Conventional analysis continues to focus on asset prices as well as adoption metrics, a parallel discussion is emerging over the infrastructure inefficiencies of on-chain assets as well as the compression of legacy revenue streams.
Now traditional banking utilities generate an estimated $100 billion annually in cross-border transaction fees while the integration of stablecoins can reduce base transaction engines to subn levels and open standard will issue its own US dollar-backed stablecoins.
Which will be known as Open USD.
Now over 100 Fintech payment as well as crypto firms and banks are launch partners and here to weigh in this morning is Paul Brody, founder and CEO of Nightfall Networks and former global blockchain leader at EY.
Great to have you here.
Thank you so much for joining me.
Thanks for having me.
Well, first and foremost, here we are as we kick off the second half of 2026, and there have been a lot of developments so far in 2026 for the first half.
So.
Where do we stand right now?
So one of my key takeaways is that this is an industry where there's not going to be any moats.
There's not going to be any sort of barriers to entry.
And so what we're seeing, for example, with the Open USD announcement yesterday and what we're seeing with all these different blockchain networks and the collapse in pricing is this is going to be a level of competition that's going to be insane.
Pricing is going to go so low that it's not even going to be sustainable for quite a lot of participants.
And I think what's settling in to everybody in the second half of 2026 is that their business plans that they had, mine included, by the way, are not feasible anymore.
Yes, and you have spent many years in the space, so you know the difference between Track and D5.
By 2026 we have seen a lot of announcements between traditional finance as well as decentralized finance, even with some of these exchanges.
So where are we headed right now?
So where we're headed is this.
Game of like competing companies are starting to resemble each other, so the crypto companies, they're getting banking licenses.
They're buying critical assets and access like bullish buying equity, and then in turn the Tradfin banking groups are getting into crypto space.
They're launching their stablecoins.
They're joining all of this, so we're seeing convergence, but I would say across this convergence, one thing that's going to be very clear is that volume of new activities is.
Going to move on to blockchain rails and as it moves on to blockchain rails over time, over time, the level of price competition in these marketplaces is going to be really transformational.
And we're talking about competition.
That is a key word here when we're talking about all the players in the ecosystem.
So what do you think will eventually happen, especially in the year of IPOs?
So I think there's going to be a struggle for some of the IPOs that come.
As people start to absorb this, there was maybe a golden window sometime over the last 6 to 9 months in the crypto space that's disappeared as people absorb the new value proposition and business models and start to rethink things.
I think that the model I have in mind is the communications industry.
In the 80s, voice telephony was 98% of the revenue.
Today, it's 0%.
It didn't mean the voice went away, but it Bundled into application suites, and I believe that's a pattern that we're going to see repeated in financial services.
Yes, and I do want to zoom in on what we're seeing in digital assets, in particular crypto, because we can't deny the fact that we are seeing a crypto winter.
And when we take a look at the crypto majors including Bitcoin as well as E, we are well off the record highs we saw at the end of last year.
So given the fact that we are seeing some layoffs at these crypto companies.
Where do you think the future is for these organizations?
So we're seeing a very significant decoupling right now.
What's happening is nothing is stopping institutional adoption.
That's full speed ahead.
And in fact, the competition driving down transaction costs is only making it more attractive for big players to start moving significant volumes.
Open USD is a good example.
A bunch of players got together and said, let's commoditize another layer of the value stack so hopefully there's more for us.
So that's the.
Adoption, scaling and volume is massively going forward.
At the same time, the world of like 500 different crypto assets is disappearing.
I personally believe we will boil down the world into two crypto assets of matter.
The first is Bitcoin.
It's digital gold.
It will have some role going forward.
It hasn't quite behaved as much like gold as I would have liked, but it's still got that position.
And then the second is ET, which is really a blockchain and crypto transaction.
Processing platform business.
And finally we have 60 seconds before I let you go.
So given the fact that basic financial transactions are expected to be less costly moving into the future, do you think selling some of this top tier data privacy to corporations may be the only way to monetize?
I absolutely do.
One of my foundational theories is that agentic commerce is the future.
We're going to have smart AI agents making business decisions for companies, but, and this is a Important, but if you're doing that on a public blockchain without privacy technology, nothing you're doing is a secret.
Your competition can roll through everything and see everything, and that is not something you want to have happen.
So I think the only real path forward for enterprise users on chains is with privacy technology.
Well, a lot to keep our eyes on as we head into the second half of 2026.
So thank you so much for joining me this morning and thank you so much for sharing your insights and perspective.
Thanks for having me.
Thank you.
